Wrap up a selection of books to read with a blanket. Here are a few favorites.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
6. Sleepytime Treats
7. Brain Food
Give a selection of learning books for now and later.
8. What about Me?
Here are a few books to get siblings excited about the baby and show them they're special too.
Pecan Pie Baby, written by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Sophie Blackall (Penguin, $16.99, 2011). Gia's new sibling hasn't been born yet, but it seems like it's the only thing everyone talks about. In this beautiful, reassuring story, a little girl learns that she'll always be as special to momma as she is right now.
There's Going to Be a Baby, written by John Burningham, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (Candlewick, $16.99, 2010) A little boy's head swirls with all that his baby sibling will want to do and see as he walks with his mom on errands and to their special places -- the garden, seaside and park -- in this tender tale.
Let's Draw and Doodle Together! Drawing Games for Kids and their Grown-Ups, by Elise Gravel (Blue Apple Books, $12.99, 2011) Show young siblings that Mom and Dad are there for them as much as before with this fun doodle book. Symbols direct kids and parents to drawing prompts, from decorating an enchanted forest to filling in colors of a rainbow.
Mama, What's In There? by Diane Muldrow, illustrated by Rick Peterson (Golden Books, $7.99, 2008) Just right for little ones wondering about their mamas' big tummies. Lift a flap to reveal a baby bear, elephant, dolphin, monkey, puppy and human curled up inside. A rotating wheel makes the baby dolphin move in the womb and a pull-out helps a human infant suck its thumb.
Where's Waldo? The Spectacular Poster Book, created by Martin Handford (Candlewick, $20, 2010) On delivery day, it's hard to wait for news of Mom and the baby, but these posters will keep siblings happily occupied. Seven scenes from classic Where's Waldo? books, plus a special poster of Waldo and his friends and jumbo press-outs of Waldo and Woof.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Animals No One Wants to Lose
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| from Disneynature African Cats |
Climate change, loss of habitat, hunting and poaching threaten all of these creatures, and in the case of manatees and whales, collisions with boats are also causing numbers to fall.
All three books, written for kids 8 and up but visually appealing to all ages, tie in beautifully with Endangered Species Day this Friday, an effort begun in 2006 to galvanize young and old to help protect disappearing species and wild places.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Scritch-Scratch a Perfect Match
By Kimberly Marcus
Illustrated by Mike Lester
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2011
$16.99, ages 4-8, 32 pages
A flea chomps into the backside of big scruffy stray and causes him to lurch into the air and into the heart of an old man in this rollicking good read-aloud.
One day on a country path, a plump flea with chiseled teeth "FLIT-FLIT" flaps into a dog's shaggy fur, takes a bite of him and sets off a hilarious chain of events.
"AAROOF!" howled the stray as he jumped in the air," Marcus writes, as the dog's eyes bulge out and every part of him stiffens -- paws flex, his tail sticks up like a feather duster and his fur spikes out in all directions.
Turning the page, readers see the dog landing back first, paws up onto an old man strolling down the path. The man is launched into the air and belly flops across the fold with his nose leading the way.
"AWOOMPH was the sound as he dropped like a sack, / landing THUD! 'OH CRUD!' on an old man's back."
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
For Backyard Explorers
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| How Things Work in the Yard |
To help nurture their enthusiasm for nature and activities they love to do in the yard, here are two learning books that will keep them wide-eyed to the last page:
For more about these sweet titles from Blue Apple Books, read my reviews below!
Bugs by the Numbers
By Sharon Werner & Sarah Forss
Blue Apple Books, 2011
$19.99, ages 4-8, 56 pages
Little entomologists will delight in every page of this clever tribute to tiny creatures that crawl and fly, pester and amaze.
The gals behind the enchanting Alphabeasties and Other Amazing Types promise a myriad of marvels in this number bug book and deliver -- with lots of giggles.
As with that award-winner, Werner and Forss build creatures from numbers of varying size and fonts, and explore facts though fun graphics and flip-out pages.
"Each bug on these pages / Looks unique and rare, / Not like the insects / You see everywhere," reads a poem in the front fold. "They're made up of numbers: / The ones that you count. / 'Cause when you think bugs, / You think BIG amounts."
How Things Work in the Yard
Blue Apple Books, 2011
$14.99, ages 4-8, 40 pages
Eyes will dart around the pages of this charming book as if they were taking in a yard awakening with activity.
With adorable paper cut-outs and facts that say just enough, award-winning Ernst answers 20 questions about what children see as they play in their yard.
Each question is posed as child would ask it: How does it work? -- whether the thing is mechanical or not -- and this gives the story a sweet feeling from the start.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Hooray for Amanda & Her Alligator!
Written and illustrated by Mo Willems
Balzer + Bray, 2011
$17.99, ages 4-8, 72 pages.
Amanda's stuffed Alligator is a handful, but she wouldn't want him to be any other way.
She just needs a way to keep this zippy little fellow as busy as he wants to be.
In this sweet picture/chapter book hybrid, Caldecott winner Willems introduces a toy that can't sit still and the girl who just wants to make him happy.
I'm a Shark
Written and illustrated by Bob Shea
Balzer + Bray, 2011
$16.99, ages 3-6, 40 pages
Shark doesn't have a nervous bone (er, piece of cartilage) in his body, but could there be one teeny tiny thing that rattles him?
Get ready for giggles. Shea is back with another fun read-aloud, this time about a big-talking shark who tries to convince a little fish and crab that nothing can scare him.
Without wasting a page, Shark swims up to readers on the first spread, catches their eyes like a happy emoticon and declares: 1) He's a shark and 2) He's totally awesome.
After all, he is big and broad. And just look at that pointy-tooth grin.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Books to Turn You Green
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| from Patrick McDonnell's Hug Time |
To help empower your children to make a greener world, I've gathered a list of stellar books about caring for Earth.
The first two celebrate children's curiosity about the natural world: Me…Jane and Gus is a Tree.
The third explores the science of weather and climate change: How the Weather Works.
The fourth calls on children to take a stand to heal the planet: Gaia Warriors.
The next shows ordinary folks becoming energy-saving heroes: Energy Island.
And the last spotlights how great it feels to reach out and care: Hug Time by the author who brought us Me…Jane.
I've also listed 10 fun ways to help your children be green. Who knows, they might just sprout grass for hair!
Me...Jane
Written & illustrated by Patrick McDonnell
$15.99, ages 3-6, 40 pages
How does a child grow to love the natural world? If you're Jane Goodall, it begins by hiding out in hen houses and laying your cheek against a tree.
In this tender tribute to the legendary anthropologist, Mutts creator McDonnell shows a girl born with wonder in her eyes and a passion for creatures big and small.
In those early years, Jane flitted about her yard with her stuffed monkey Jubilee, watching nature unfold and climbing trees. She'd see birds knit together nests and squirrels scamper in spirals around trees.
Jane read everything she could about the things she saw and the exotic place she imagined visiting, a far-off place known as Africa where real-life chimpanzees perched in branches just like she loved to do with Jubilee.
She was entranced by Tarzan of the Apes (imagining herself Tarzan's Jane), dreamed of being Dr. Doolittle and filled every inch of her scrapbooks with observations, sketches and quizzes for a nature club she formed with her sisters, The Alligator Society.
Gus is a Tree
Written by Claire Babin
Illustrated by Oliver Tallec
Enchanted Lion, 2008
$14.99 each, ages 3-8, 32 pages
As a boy rests against a tree, he dreams that his feet have rooted into the ground and he's sprouted branches in this exhilarating French import.
In this second book in the Gus nature series, Gus steals away to sit quietly under a tree while other children in his schoolyard peel around and play.
He loves the grooves of the tree's bark, the way the leaves shimmer above him and the earthy fragrance of the wood.
With his back against the tree, he closes his eyes, reaches up with his hands to stroke the bark and remembers a walk through the forest with his father.
As memories of twigs crackling underfoot return, slumber takes him and Gus dreams.
In his imagination, he's a big old tree with thick branches for arms and bark striped like the sleeves of his shirt.
How the Weather Works
A Hands-On Guide to
Our Changing Climate
Our Changing Climate
Written by Christiane Dorion
Illustrated by Beverley Young
Templar, 2011
$17.99, ages 7-11, 20 pages
Everyone's talking about climate change, but ask them to tell you what it is and chances are they'll get tongue-tied.
The subject is so complex and hotly debated that it's hard for children, let alone many adults, to digest what it means.
And unless you know what climate change is all about, how do you start to care about it?
In this wonderful movable guide to weather, the team behind last year's acclaimed How the World Works demystifies climate change by sorting through terms kids need to know to understand it, like what is the water cycle and ozone.
Almost the entire book is about weather, and it's only after readers work through the fundamentals, from how the sun causes weather to where rain comes from and why the wind blows, do the book's creators address climate change.
Gaia Warriors
By Nicola Davies
Afterword by James Lovelock
Candlewick, 2011
$14.99, ages 11-14, 192 pages
Earth's climate is changing fast, but don't be gloomy about it because the fight is on to slow it down and all you have to do is join in, says author Davies in her guide.
Inspired by scientist James Lovelock's theory that Earth is a living system, the guide is a no-nonsense look at how and why the climate is changing, and what readers can do to keep it from getting warmer.
Is the problem big? Davies asks. "Yes. Scary? Maybe. But let's do it anyway." Why? Because we have to, she says.
Davies calls on kids to be warriors for change, and begins and ends the book with quotes that drive home the idea that only people can make the changes happen and if they're to succeed, they can't get bogged down by doubts.
Energy Island
How One Community Harnessed the Wind and Changed their World
Written and illustrated by Allan Drummond
Frances Foster Books, 2011
$16.99, ages 6-10, 40 pages
A Danish island where hats are always flying off heads learns to harness the energy of the wind and takes itself off the grid.
In this remarkable true story, Drummond tells about the people of Samso who used the very thing they couldn't escape from -- buffeting winds -- to work for them.
In 1997, Denmark's government designated the island as its "renewable energy island" -- a region that could eventually run completely on free, nonpolluting energy thanks in a large part to its windy location.
Since then, the island off the Jutland peninsula has become almost entirely energy independent through the use of wind turbines, as well as district heating plants, biomass and solar panels.
It's even able to export surplus electricity from those turbines to the mainland and it has eliminated its carbon emissions by 140 percent.
That means if you were to look for a carbon footprint there, you wouldn't find one.
But becoming a green island wasn't quick and it wasn't easy.
Hug Time
$14.99, ages 4-8, 48 pages.
Jules, the big-hearted kitten from McDonnell's comic strip Mutts, walks the world over trying to make hurts go away in this classic gem.
With the help of his girl Doozy, the little tabby puts on his green sweater and sets out into the world with a Hug To-Do List and front legs ready to cuddle.
First thing out the door, Jules wraps himself around each of his buddies, Mooch the feline, Noodles the alley cat and Earl the dog.
Then before he's gone far, he leaps up to give a butterfly a squeeze, and embraces a bed of buttercups and a gray squirrel.
Then it's off to the park to hug every bird he can find and next: the wide open sea. He's determined to find a big blue whale and soon spots a Y-shaped tail.
From the bow of an ocean liner, Jules reaches his arms out as the whale cranes its wide neck and hugs all of the whale that he can: a teeny tiny hug for a huge fellow.
Soon the ship docks in Africa and Jules realizes a hug just won't do, so he kisses the ground -- "the earth so precious, so fragile, so round," McDonnell writes.
Go Green Today!
10 Ways to Help Children Be Green:
1. Praise them for flipping off lights and turning off water. Then reward them by using the money saved from utility bills for a treat.
2. Help them collect fruit peels and other scraps for a compost pile. Then when it's ready, let them dig for earthworms.
3. Encourage them to take faster showers. Kids love hour-glass and wind-up timers. See if they can beat your time.
4. Walk or bicycle with them to school. Bring along a pedometer to see how far you go. Then at the end of the year, add up your miles and reward them with a camping trip.
5. Show them how to sort cans, bottles and other recyclables. Then challenge them to generate as little trash each week as they can by reusing some things and avoiding others.
6. Take them on a hike up a hill where they can look out and see the world, help them plant their own tree or bring them to a flower field and let them look for bees, butterflies and bunnies.
7. Help them grow organic vegetables, fruits and berries. Give them Popsicle sticks and colored pens to make plant markers, and a watering can. Plant marigolds to discourage pests naturally.
8. Ask them to help pack their lunch using reusable containers, and include recycled paper napkins, biodegradable plastic utensils and goodies made from the fruits and vegetables they've grown.
9. Hold an Earth party. Hand out fabric shopping totes to paint, make their favorite animal from old boxes and odds and ends, juice organic fruits to pour over shaved iced, plant wheat grass in eggshells.
10. Walk the block with them to pick up trash, adopt a roadside to clean up or form a Roots & Shoots club with their friends. For more on Jane Goodall's program, click here.
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Little Red Pen
By Susan Stevens Crummel
Illustrated by Janet Stevens
Harcourt, 2011
$16.99, ages 4-8, 56 pages
A high-strung pen incites a drawer full of school supplies to help her grade papers, in this hilarious twist on two beloved fables.
The award-winning Stevens sisters play with themes from Chicken Little (the folly of hysteria) and The Little Red Hen (the importance of hard work) to suggest a funny new lesson:
Spreading unfound fear and panic can help get a job done -- especially if you're a paranoid pen in a storybook and you're working with a gullible set of school supplies.
One day after class, a red correction pen in glasses and a pointy red cap proclaims in Chicken Little fashion that a catastrophe will occur -- if papers aren't corrected before students return the next day.
However, like Little Red Hen, she can't find anyone to help her.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
The Emerald Atlas
By John Stephens
Alfred A. Knopf, 2011
$17.99, ages 8-12, 432 pages
Three orphans travel back in time through the pages of an atlas to guard secrets that brought the world into being in the most talked-about children's novel of the year.
In this first book in a trilogy, the writer for the TV series Gilmore Girls crafts a spirited, page-turning fantasy that's at times derivative of C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, but sets itself apart with it own cleverly realized sequences of time travel.
Stephens deftly manages the consequences of going back in time and changing the course of history with a deceivingly simple plot that has the orphans rescuing a village from a terrible past and, at least for now, guarding the world from a witch.
While wandering the eerie rooms of their new orphanage, siblings Kate, Michael and Emma discover an ancient book of wizardry that transports them 15 years into the past where a witch is ransoming the town's children for the very book that sent them there.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
A New Dr. Seuss Book? Really?!
On Sept. 27, Random House will release The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories, a collection of seven stories by the incomparable Dr. Seuss.
The stories were published in Redbook Magazine in 1950 and 1951, but never appeared in book form.
The stories were published in Redbook Magazine in 1950 and 1951, but never appeared in book form.
"We're like happy prospectors, having discovered a hidden vein of gold," said Kate Klimo, vice president of Random House/Golden Books Young Readers Group.
Here's a sneak peek:
1. "The Bear, the Rabbit and the Zinniga-Zanniga" is about a quick-thinking rabbit who outwits a bear with a single eyelash. *
(This story also was recorded by Marvin Miller in the album Dr. Seuss Presents: Fox in Socks/Green Eggs and Ham.)
(This story also was recorded by Marvin Miller in the album Dr. Seuss Presents: Fox in Socks/Green Eggs and Ham.)
2. "Gustav the Goldfish" is an early, rhymed version of the Beginner Book A Fish Out of Water, in which a boy buys a fish and is warned not to overfeed it.3. "Tadd and Todd" is a tale passed down via photocopy to generations of twins.
4. "Steak for Supper" is about fantastic creatures who follow a boy home in anticipation of a steak dinner.5. "The Bippolo Seed" is about a scheming cat who leads an innocent duck to make a bad decision.
6. "The Strange Shirt Spot" was inspired by the bathtub-ring scene in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.
7. "The Great Henry McBride" is about a boy whose fantasies of a far-flung career are only bested by those of Dr. Seuss.
In an introduction, Dr. Seuss scholar and collector Charles D. Cohen discusses the stories' themes, including the importance of imagination and the dangers of greed.
He also notes that all seven marked a shift in Dr. Seuss's writing style from primarily prose to the rhymes we've come to adore.
He also notes that all seven marked a shift in Dr. Seuss's writing style from primarily prose to the rhymes we've come to adore.
Due to printing limitations of those early magazines, Random House is enhancing the colors of the illustrations to match Dr. Seuss's other books.
For more about Seuss's original stories in Redbook, visit Children's Picturebook Collecting here.
* You may have noticed that the word, "Zinniga-Zanniga," is spelled differently in Redbook. According to Cohen, in his book The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss, the title word was likely misprinted as "Zinniga-Zinnaga."
* You may have noticed that the word, "Zinniga-Zanniga," is spelled differently in Redbook. According to Cohen, in his book The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss, the title word was likely misprinted as "Zinniga-Zinnaga."
Monday, March 28, 2011
Chalk the Block
Add Humor to Your Neighborhood
By Michael Sherman
Klutz, 2011
$12.99, ages 6 and up, 40 pages.
Concrete got the blahs around your block?
Grab some chalk and turn all that wear and tear to your comic advantage.
In this fun twist on an old pastime, Sherman inspires kids to turn ugly concrete into a crack up with a few strokes of chalk.
"Release your inner smart aleck," he encourages before taking readers through a basic how-to and a slew of his own ideas.
The book comes with four fat pieces of chalk and pictures of cracks, walls, steps, rocks even drains dressed up silly.
There's even a section on how to take hopscotch up a notch (literally up a wall) and transform blacktop into track for tricycle test driving.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Say Hello to Zorro!
Written & illustrated by Carter Goodrich
Simon & Schuster, 2011
$15.99, ages 4-8, 48 pages
Mister Bud the terrier had it good when it was just himself and his human.
But now his human has adopted a curly-tailed pug named Zorro and Mister Bud feels like he's losing control of how things work around home.
But now his human has adopted a curly-tailed pug named Zorro and Mister Bud feels like he's losing control of how things work around home.
And who could blame him?
Until Zorro arrived, Mister Bud thought he was the center of everything.
He had a title of respect prefixed to his name, and what's more, he had his schedule and everyone stuck to it.
Until Zorro arrived, Mister Bud thought he was the center of everything.
He had a title of respect prefixed to his name, and what's more, he had his schedule and everyone stuck to it.
In this charming picture book, the lead character designer of Despicable Me explores what it's like to be an only pet -- to have things just the way you want them -- then have another pet thrust into your life and threaten to mess it all up.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Two Gems for Women's History Month
Girls will feel like they've strapped on wings after reading these captivating true stories of early 20th Century women who refused to let their future be decided for them.
Just in time for Women's History Month come two stellar accounts of women who challenged themselves to dream bigger than women ever had: Wheels of Change by Sue Macy and Amelia Lost by Candace Fleming.
Each book is meticulously researched, and packed with gems of information -- anecdotes, quotations, even poems -- that will make readers' spirits soar and inspire girls to be confident in their pursuits and not let anyone hold them back.
Wheels of Change
(With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way)
By Sue Macy
National Geographic, 2011
$18.95, ages 8 and up, 96 pages
For women at the close of the 19th Century, the bicycle was like a silent steed ready to carry them away.
It gave them courage to break free of society's rigid hold and carve out their own dreams, according to this fascinating account by award-winning Macy.
"Imagine a population imprisoned by their very clothing: the stiff corsets, heavy skirts...," she writes. "And how liberated they must have been as they pedaled their wheels toward new horizons."
It gave them courage to break free of society's rigid hold and carve out their own dreams, according to this fascinating account by award-winning Macy.
"Imagine a population imprisoned by their very clothing: the stiff corsets, heavy skirts...," she writes. "And how liberated they must have been as they pedaled their wheels toward new horizons."
With the arrival of the high-wheeler and later bicycles in America, women gained a degree of mobility they'd never known and gradually, often unconsciously began to try things that only men were allowed to do.
The female cyclist "did not have to be born again in some mysterious fashion, becoming a strange creature, a 'new woman,'" Munsey's Magazine suggested in 1896. "She is more like the 'eternal feminine,' who has taken on wings, and who is using them with an ever increasing delight in her new power."
A few years later, a French cycling poster echoed this perception, showing an Athenian-looking woman with angel wings standing beside her two-wheeler.
Amelia Lost
By Candace Fleming
Schwartz & Wade, 2011
$18.99, ages 8-12, 128 pages.
Award-winning Fleming strips away the mystique surrounding legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart to show a woman as fallible as any other -- yet driven to conquer the air like no woman before her.
"All I wished to do in the world was to be a vagabond in the air," Earhart once said, and though Earhart met criticism in her later career for profiting from aviation, it was this guiding dream that's defined Earhart at least until her death.
When Earhart's plane vanished in 1937, her husband, late publisher George Putnam, worried that her disappearance would overshadow her legacy, and for some perhaps it has, yet Fleming doesn't dwell on Earhart's disappearance but lets it fade in and out of chapters about her life.
Fleming (The Great and Only Barnum) makes sure we see Earhart for what she was, a typical woman in many ways, but uniquely driven. As biographer Mary S. Lovell described Earhart, she was "an ordinary girl growing into an extraordinary woman who dared to attempt seemingly unattainable goals in a man's world."
We meet a woman who was at times impulsive and headstrong, who with Putnam could work the media and profited greatly from her record-setting feats, yet who had unstoppable courage and enthusiasm, and who not only earnestly believed a woman could do everything a man could do, but wanted other women to believe that to.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Owly & Wormy: Friends All Aflutter
Atheneum Books, 2011
$15.99, ages 3-7, 40 pages.
Owly wants butterflies so badly he can barely stand it. But nothing seems to lure them into his garden.
Then one day he meets two plump green bugs that make him forget that having friends with fancy wings was ever important to him.
Well, almost forget -- that is, until the rainy season passes and a couple of leathery pouches in his garden do the "shaky shake."
Owly, the big-eyed owl from Runton's Owly graphic novel series, makes his full-color debut in this super-sweet picture book that shows that it's not what's on the outside that counts in friendship.
As with the Owly comics, the story is told through symbols and expressions, and is virtually wordless, yet it reads as vividly as any word-based picture book thanks to clever pictographs that appear above characters' heads.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Night Flight: Amelia Earhart Crosses the Atlantic
By Robert Burleigh
Paintings by Wendell Minor
A Paula Wiseman Book, 2011
$16.99, ages 4-8, 40 pages
If words could fly, these would.
In this poetic account of aviatrix Amelia Earhart's solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, readers feel like they're taking off with her, and imagine what she must have seen and felt.
Burleigh's words thrill with their immediacy and momentum, while Minor's paintings envelop readers in the vastness and mercurial nature of the sky.
From the moment Earhart's single-engine Vega rolls down the dirt runway in Newfoundland en route to France, readers find themselves surrendering to whatever will happen.
It is May 1932. Earhart "pushes her last doubts into a secret place deep inside her," and readers too take in a deep breath and feel the plane's wheels go faster and faster. Her courage will now be their own.
Once the Vega is aloft, solitude embraces readers; "the plane swoops like a swallow" over tundra and ascends higher into the waning light of late day, rising upward until they can no longer hear the surf.
"Amelia Earhart lives for this moment: / to follow the wide horizon that never ends!" Burleigh writes -- and we imagine we live for it too.
At first the mood of the flight is one of bliss. The night is calm and the Vega soars eastward into "wisps of shimmering clouds" and expanses of glistening stars.
Earhart feels at ease and indulges in reflection about "first-time things"; among them, standing before whirling propellers as a young girl: "The props send puffs of soft snow into her delighted eyes."
Her mind soars with all that's she's looked down upon and her conviction "to try to do things as men have tried." There is an expectation that the trip will remain smooth and sure.
"But she is wrong," Burleigh writes, his words hauntingly unequivocal in the last line on the page, as the ocean grows choppy and lives up to his description as "dark and seething."
Midnight arrives abruptly with a flash of lightning, its tendrils reaching down before her path.
"Fists of rain pummel the cockpit windshield," stirring Earhart from a half-dream; is it thunder or her heart pounding?
Monday, March 7, 2011
I Must Have Bobo!
By Eileen Rosenthal
Illustrated by Marc Rosenthal
Atheneum Books, 2011
$14.99, ages 3-6, 40 pages
Bobo the sock money is Willy's and Willy's alone. So why is Earl the cat stealing time with Bobo when Willy isn't looking?
In this darling first collaboration by author Eileen Rosenthal and husband Marc, author-illustrator of Phooey!, a boy and his cat vie over which of them should get Bobo all to himself.
One morning Willy awakes to find that his best stuffed toy Bobo isn't where he should be and in a panic, yells out to anyone who will listen, "I need Bobo!"
Willy opens his eyes so wide that his pupils shrink to dots and he stretches his arms up high, showing just how much he means what he says.
How can Willy possibly get through a day without his trusted toy? After all, Bobo helps Willy do everything:
When Willy sees a bitey-bug and pokes him with a stick, it's Bobo he clutches in one of his arms. When Willy goes down a slide super fast with his eyes sealed shut, it's Bobo he hugs in front of him.
And when Willy walks past the fence that holds in a big, jowly dog (the one who stands on his hind legs watching Willy and clutches the pickets with his front paws), it's Bobo who holds his hand.
Knowing how much he counts on Bobo to get him through scary times, Willy can hardly bear the thought of losing him. "I must have Bobo!" he yells, this time gripping his head in both hands.
But hold on a second. What's that moving under Willy's bed covers on the next page? Isn't that Earl's gray tail hanging out from the blanket?
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
The Crows of Pearblossom
Illustrated by Sophie Blackall
Abrams Books, 2011
$16.95, ages 4-8, 40 pages.
The crows of Pearblossom are back and as snippety as ever, but have a winsome look that makes their squabbles more fun to laugh at.
In this sunny redo of Aldous Huxley's classic, Sophie Blackall lightens the look of the story just enough that the digs between the married crows don't seem as harsh and the ending feels less morose.
The story, about a crow couple who takes revenge on a snake who's been eating their eggs, was published in 1967 as a reader with mostly black-ink illustrations by award-winning Barbara Cooney and returns now as a full-color picture book.
Skies of lemon yellow, clear-day blue and misty coral warm the pages, and the crows, despite their acerbic tongues, look adorable. Their shiny black button eyes glisten and their armlike wings look like the soft branches of a Victorian feather tree.
Aided by the larger format, Blackall expands upon whimsical touches that made Cooney's version a gem and makes the story seem cheery even at the end -- when the snake dies a slow death from eating clay eggs, then is strung into a clothes line.
She also cleverly draws off Huxley's sense of irony. At one point Mrs. Crow is laying in bed with huge pink rollers on her head and her skinny tongue is frozen in mid rant, while a meek Mr. Crow lashes out at her while hiding behind his friend Owl.
This is a story that you love for the very things that make you uneasy about it. It's blunt and grim, yet in a clever, tongue-in-cheek way, and though you wonder if it would have been published if written by a less famous author, Huxley's audacity is refreshing for a genre that is generally sweet-toned and idealistic.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Cousins of Clouds: Elephant Poems
Illustrated by Megan Halsey and Sean Addy
Clarion Books, 2011
$16.99, ages 4-8, 32 pages
You may be fond of elephants, but read this beguiling book of poetry and you'll wish you could save every one.
Zimmer brings elephants into greater focus and heightens our respect for them, in a whimsical, if at times sobering tribute to the world's largest land mammal.
Every spread combines meticulously worded poems and soft, winsome collages, along with notes that expound upon their traits and threats to their survival.
In one, the profile of a sweet-eyed elephant spans the fold of two pages, its appendages painted to resemble objects that are similar in size or form.
Ears look like "tattered sails," the tail swishes like a "tapered rope" with a "fancy tassel," a sturdy hind leg becomes a Grecian pillar and another is inset with a slipper to suggest lightness of foot.
In another, Zimmer rejoices for elephants rescued from circuses or fairs, now living out their last days on a 2,700-acre refuge in Tennessee, their "trumpets and rumblings as hopeful as light."
In another, Zimmer rejoices for elephants rescued from circuses or fairs, now living out their last days on a 2,700-acre refuge in Tennessee, their "trumpets and rumblings as hopeful as light."
Though Zimmer never comes out and appeals for help saving the endangered elephant, she deepens our understanding of these sapient creatures and asks us to contemplate how humans affect their lives.
In doing so, she skillfully involves us in their plight and makes us want to protect them.
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